MATT PARISH

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Reformation This weekend (January 20-21) brings a two-night stand at Brighton Music Hall for post-punk godfathers Mission of Burma, who have somehow morphed into a band that's equal parts internationally renowned throwbacks and prolific local underdogs.

William Gibson's randomized experience William Gibson — the writer who famously coined the term "cyberpunk" and whose classic tech-punk novels like Neuromancer and The Difference Engine helped spawn a couple generations' worth of bleak, busted fantasies — is now on tour promoting his first collection of nonfiction.

Brah/Jagjaguwar (2011) It's tempting to point to the recent tsunami in Japan as having a heavy cosmic connection with Shinji Masuko's first solo record, a full-immersion blackout of churning, oceanic drones and melodic eddies.

Musical afterlife It must be a relief to realize that when you hit the stage, people know what they're going to get. O'Death have spent the past several years banging out a reputation as grizzled folk punks who run their sets like moonshine raids.

Antiques roadshow It was on a whim roughly 25 years ago that a young David Lowery called up a friend at SST Records to see how SST had been promoting records that year. "He just said, 'Hey, we've been sending a lot of our stuff to college radio stations, and they seem to be playing them a lot.' I mean, this is literally like how this all started."

Blitzkrieg pop Last month, when scraggly local trio Young Adults wandered out on stage at the Middle East downstairs to open for hyped lo-fi darlings Best Coast, college indie brats were already thronging the room.

Don Giovanni (2010) Screaming Females are one of those rare examples of a band who fester so long in the dark — in this case, the teeming basements of New Brunswick, New Jersey — that they sour into something great by the time anyone’s heard of them.